MASSIVE BOMB SHATTERS LONDON'S BUSINESS AREA

LONDON -- A huge bomb hidden in a parked truck shattered the heart of London's financial district on Saturday, killing one person, wounding more than 40 others and raising a mushroom cloud of smoke that was visible across much of the capital.

About 14 hours after the massive IRA bomb exploded, two car bombs rocked the city again. There were no casualties in the two blasts just before midnight, a police spokeswoman said.

Detectives at Scotland Yard blamed the Irish Republican Army, for the first blast. The IRA set off a similar truck bomb in the same neighborhood a year ago, killing three people and causing $1.25 billion in damage.

The body of a man was discovered nearly six hours after the explosion by police searching buildings on Bishopsgate, the city thoroughfare on which the construction truck thought to contain the bomb was parked.

Because it was a weekend morning, only a handful of office workers and building security personnel were in the City of London, as the financial district is known.

The City is well-traveled by tourists and tour buses, drawn by its narrow streets and many old churches.

Witnesses said the force of the explosion, which came after several telephone warnings, sent people crying and screaming through the streets as glass from the windows of banks and skyscrapers rained down over several square blocks.

Streets were carpeted with broken shards, and the interiors of some buildings resembled stage sets, the furniture inside exposed to the open air. Most of the windows on the eastern side of the 52-story National Westminister Tower, London's second-tallest, were gone, and window blinds fluttered in the spring wind.

The explosion gouged a 15-foot-wide crater in the street near the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building and blew in the building's lobby.

"It's just damage everywhere," said Nigel Tree, who was working in the bank. "All the doors of the lift shafts have been blown in. There's very little standing apart from the core wall."

One insurance executive said damage from the bombing might exceed losses from the April 10 explosion last year. Nicholas Balcombe, chief executive of a London insurance broker, estimated that damage from this bombing would exceed $1.5 billion.

After last year's explosion, many insurance companies refused to cover any further losses resulting from terrorist attacks in the City of London, and the government moved to create a special fund to help underwrite such losses. While the measure has not yet been passed into law by Parliament, the government said on Saturday that it would help meet costs.

Police cordoned off nearly a square mile of the City of London while they searched through damaged buildings.

Most of those wounded were treated for shock or cuts received as a result of flying glass.

Among the wounded was a police officer helping to evacuate the area at the time the bomb detonated.

The first telephoned warning, which carried a pre-arranged IRA code word to indicate it was not a crank call, was received by police about an hour earlier.